In 1943, aged 15, she joined the Women's Emergency Signalling Corps in Sydney where she taught Morse code to the personnel from the Australian Air Force, Merchant Navy and also American Airmen, who had trouble grasping the concept.
Suddenly thrust into a man's world as a teenager, she together with her mother and 5-year-old brother, faced the complexities of running a rural property – compounded by wartime rationing and a raging drought.
A year after Studdy-Clift took over “Kareela” her father was invalided out of the Army and to relieve their manpower shortage they were assigned three Italian prisons of war (POW) for working on the property.
Marrying Jim Clift from Breeza, NSW in 1948, they moved in late 1954 to a river front property near Condamine in the western Darling Downs in Queensland, which they developed with almost 30 years of hard but rewarding work.
Again she faced many challenges, not the least of which was being left alone by the menfolk in a heavily pregnant state and with a small but active toddler and his two older brothers, who travelled to school by boat and bus, while being surrounded by floodwaters for 6 months and having no forms of communication.
Jessie's early circus life, cattle duffing, repeated escapes from the police and her final taming are now portrayed for all but like most accounts of bushranging adventures it is mixed with truth, legend and mystery.
The first chronicled the history of a small 1934 monoplane called St Paulus that started its flying life in the wild and rugged New Guinea mainland for a German-based Catholic mission and after many adventures and mishaps, including an attack by a Japanese Zero, the plane ended up in Australia.
Her second effort also came from New Guinea during World War II when, aided by an Aussie ex-pat, a group of five nuns walked for three months from the Sepik coast over some of the most rugged country on earth up the highlands to escape the Japanese.
Studdy-Clift's final literary effort, an addendum to her Lady Bushranger book, provides an update of her continuing research and data collection on that subject since its original publication 15 years before.
Even in her senior years life is never dull for Pat as she often is presented as one of the Lismore City Library's Living Books that ‘readers’ borrow for half an hour before putting her back ‘on the shelf’!